Ranker is a crowdsourced platform that attracts more than 30 million consumerst a month to view, rank, and vote on broad opinion-based questions ranging from the "Best Board Games" to "Hottest Celebrities" to "Best Inexpensive Cars," Ranker is the “Yelp for everything else” to consumers. Outside of a few verticals such as travel and restaurants, crowdsourced rankings are hard to find, even as consumer demand for opinion-based answers is far outpacing other queries. A Quantcast Top 50 site, Ranker has built a solid, rapidly growing advertising and affilate ecommerce business as a publisher where consumers find highly credible, crowdsourced answers. Equally importantly, Ranker is a fully datacentric company - the enterprise value of our proprietary data may dwarf the consumer business. Our uniquely engaging interface (10% of visitors to votable rankings vote, on 21 items per visit) is the hook for a fully-semantic consumer data collection machine. This data produces continually updated rankings with intrinsic value far beyond regular pageviews and has in parallell built an “opinion graph” (people who like X also like Y, and think Z is expensive) with 6 million “edges”. Due to the datacentric way Ranker was architected, our graph is fully “clean” data, requiring no messy postprocessing or natural-language-processing. This data has immense value to market researchers, ad agencies, ad targeters, and other enterprise customers who derive value from consumer psychographics.

MuckerLab is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator focused on serving Internet software, services and media entrepreneurs in Los Angeles and broader Southern California.

I am the founder of the Almighty Music Marketing which includes New Releases Now, Almighty Institute of Music Retail and ISIS Listening Stations. Joel Oberstein, our President and my partner in the venture, runs the day-to-day and is the person to contact there. Almighty provides services to record labels and distributors. The Almighty b-2-b database product (Almighty Institute of Music Retail) launched in 2003. In addition to our database we offer other marketing services - www.almightyretail.com for more info. We are the people to talk to if you are looking to better promote and sell your music to retail. We also have ISIS Listening Stations - an indie store program still cranking along in our 15th year.Our latest offering is at www.newreleasesnow.com - for consumers, it's a weekly player of all the worthwhile new album releases. For record labels, it's a very reasonably priced way to get a new release in front of hundreds of thousands of people a month, both music fans and an all-encompassing music industry mailing list.

I was cofounder/seed investor/had the original idea for eCRUSH (the main site is www.espin.com), a youth-oriented consumer dot com/early social network that at peak was doing over 30MM monthly pageviews, and leveraged a lead-based business model that was a precursor to the OfferPal type model. The company was sold to Hearst Interactive at the end of 2006. eCrush was actually based in Chicago although I have lived in Los Angeles for the last 15 years (long story). The story of eCrush was summarized pretty well here: http://www.startup-review.com/blog/ecrush-case-study-why-timing-the-ma-market-is-tricky.php